Nearly 90% of the brands we speak to want more enquiries, more prospects, more form-fills, more leads... in a nutshell, everyone wants more RoI.

The lead generation process and campaigns—and hence the demands and metrics—are different for B2B and B2C brands.

Other factors that affect lead generation campaigns are the product category, product type and costs involved. Is it a TV that is bought once in 5 years, or a T-shirt that is bought multiple times a year? Is it a luxury item (like a handbag), a recurring purchase (like coffee) or a one-off novelty purchase (Star Wars drone, for instance)? How much does the product or service cost? Is it low-volume high margin or high-volume low-margin?

All these parameters impact the customer purchase journey, and hence the lead generation campaign.

Broadly speaking, these are the key metrics you track to ascertain the efficacy of your lead generation e-campaigns :

Performance metrics - These tell you how well your campaigns are performing - whether it is an ad, a creative, a mailer, an offer or a landing page. The numbers are readily available on Google Analytics, social media reporting dashboards, and on all the popular emailing platforms.

Click-Through Rate (CTR) - measures how many people are clicking on your call to action (CTA) on the ad, emailer or landing page.

Conversion Rate - this is the most important metric which tells you how many people are performing the specific action, which could be filling a form, clicking a button or even making a purchase. A smart move is to track conversion at multiple levels: (i) From visitors to leads, (ii) From leads to opportunities and (iii) From opportunities to clients.

Cost metrics - These metrics give you a sense of the costs involved in acquiring leads. Cost Per Click (CPC) and Cost Per Mille (CPM) are tracked for paid ads. All advertising tools, and the Performance and Clicks section of Facebook, provide this metric. Based on the category and type of product, you can refer to benchmark data for these metrics.

Channel metrics - This is to determine which of your marketing channels are generating the best, most and cheapest leads. The marketing channels could be SEO, social media, mailers, display ads, or others. Lead generation rate is the total number of leads captured divided by the total number of visitors through that channel. However, if you're studying channel performance, study this metric in conjunction with the traffic acquisition costs in that channel. Usually, social media visitors generally convert at a lower rate than PPC or SEO traffic. This is why it’s a good idea to factor in traffic acquisition costs when measuring the performance of any channel.

The bottom line: Numbers could be a marketer’s best friend; they will speak the truth, and only the truth. If you use them right, they will give you enormous comfort too!

Do you have any best practices to share on Lead Generation metrics that have worked for you, and is now your best friend?

To make all this easier for you, my awesome team has come up with this super cool and easy-to-use sheet that not only gives you the world of metrics you can start tracking, but also tells you where to find them in your reports.